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White Papers

How Network Forensics Can Help Human Resource Compliance

Something wrong is happening on your network. Call it human nature or simply a few bad apples, but unless your organization is miraculously different from all others, someone is leaking information, someone else is dabbling in porn, and someone else is probably doing a handsome business on eBay—on one of your servers.

Your organization has policies about this—and your industry may have regulations that pertain, as well. You need to ensure these policies are complied with—or you need to collect evidence to take action when they’re not.

When you suspect something is wrong, do you have the means to conduct an investigation? How do you collect evidence—digital evidence—when there are so many channels of communication (email, Web mail, IM, etc.), and so many places to look on your network?

Time for network forensics.

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A Network Engineer’s Guide to Troubleshooting User Satisfaction Problems with SAP Applications

Is It the Application or the Network?

If you’re a network engineer in an organization that runs SAP, you’re probably familiar with the challenge of troubleshooting SAP networking problems.

A typical scenario goes like this. End users of a SAP application complain about poor application performance. The SAP BASIS Administrator and Database Administrator report that the SAP applications themselves are performing correctly. They suggest that the real problem lies with the network. They ask you to troubleshoot the problem.

But is the network really the problem? How can you tell? Without in-depth SAP expertise and tools, how can you accurately diagnose a SAP application performance problem?

This White Paper discusses a new application performance metric, Apdex, created by an industry consortium, the Apdex Alliance, specifically to address the challenge of analyzing application performance in meaningful terms. Learn how Apdex scores can help you troubleshoot SAP applications, how to measure SAP Application Performance with the OmniPeek Product Family, and much more.

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New White Paper and Reports from the Farpoint Group

The Effects of Interference on General WLAN Traffic

As wireless LANs proliferate and become the default connectivity for essentially all users in enterprise environments (and beyond), interference issues are becoming more acute. Fortunately, a combination of Spectrum Assurance tools, WLAN Assurance tools, and RF Spectrum Management tools are very effective in dealing with this challenge. This document contains the results of a series of experiments using a methodology for evaluating the effects of various forms of interference on a number of types of wireless-LAN traffic. These experiments were performed in a typical office environment, designed specifically to simulate your own office environment.
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The Effects of Interference on Video Over Wi-Fi

Video transmission over Wi-Fi is becoming more important, both in the Residence for reasons of convenience, reduced installation expense, and mobility, and in the enterprise as video sees greater application in Webinars, corporate information distribution, and other applications. However, video represents perhaps the greatest challenge to performance on LANs of any form, whether wired or wireless. Farpoint Group ran a series of benchmark tests, both quantitative and qualitative, to evaluate the impact of a variety of forms of radio interference on Wi-Fi-based video transmission. They compared the results obtained when subjected to interference against a baseline obtained in a relatively unimpaired radio environment.
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The Effects of Interference on VoFi Traffic

Farpoint Group believes that Voice over IP over Wi-Fi (VoFi) will become much more common and popular over the next few years. This trend is driven by the convenience of cordless phones, but also by the increasing availability of converged cellular/Wi-Fi subscriber units that will allow a single handset to serve a user's voice (and data) communication needs in the enterprise, the residence, and in the wide area. Our previous studies have shown that radio-frequency interference can have a major detrimental impact on general WLAN traffic and on video delivered over Wi-Fi. Farpoint sets out to discover whether interference from common wireless devices operating at the same frequencies as wireless LANs could have a similar impact on VoFi.
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Interference and Metro-Scale Wi-Fi Mesh Networks

Farpoint Group has been performing detailed studies of the effects of interference on Wi-Fi-based wireless LANs (WLANs) for much of the past year. Their focus has been on exploring the nature of interference from a variety of angles, and a variety of traffic types, including general traffic, streaming video over Wi-Fi, and voice over IP over Wi-Fi (VoFi). There is one key application area for WLANs that remains to be explored with respect to the impact of interference, and that is metro-scale Wi-Fi mesh networks. The purpose of this document is to explore the effects of interference on Wi-Fi mesh networks, and to discuss possible approaches to mitigate interference in mesh networks.
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The Invisible Threat: Interference and WirelessLANs

Farpoint Group is conducting an extensive study of the impact of RF interference on wireless LANs. This White Paper discusses the threat of interference to WLAN reliability and performance. It also discusses how spectrum analysis tools can provide network managers with an effective approach for assessing and minimizing interference.
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Evaluating Interference in Wireless LANs: Recommended Practice

Interference can come from many sources—not only other WLANs, but also devices as varied as Bluetooth headsets and microwave ovens. Depending on the moment-by-moment characteristics of interference and WLAN traffic, the impact of this interference can be slight or severe. This Tech Notes presents recommended practices for evaluating WLAN interference.
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Application Performance Index: Measuring the Quality of Experience

WildPackets is a founding member of the Application Performance Index (Apdex) Alliance, an open consortium of leading vendors in the network analysis and measurement industry that have defined a new performance reporting methodology. The Apdex methodology normalizes all the incompatible performance metrics currently deployed in various other Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and other tools, including network analyzers. Read this free white paper to learn more about the Apdex metric and its usefulness for characterizing an end user's experience with an application.

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Other White Papers

- VoIP: Changing the Dynamics of Network Analysis

- WildPackets Guide to Network Analysis

- WildPackets Guide to Wireless LAN Analysis